road-trip-girl

hit with the gay baseball bat

hi. i'm hanging out. i like fire emblem and comics and stories and women. i don't post very often.

i am over 18


my neocities website
road-trip-girl.neocities.org

BridgetEndeavor
@BridgetEndeavor

I'm a chronic migraine sufferer. I get them fairly regularly and they typically last between 24 and 72 hours, though they have gone longer before. They are basically completely debilitating and I can barely function in any capacity while they're in full effect. I have since found new(to me) ways to manage them to be less severe or more likely to let up sooner, but that's not the focus of this story.

I used to have a lot of lingering self-doubts centered around my migraines. I used to regularly wonder if what I was experiencing was just what other people called normal headaches, the kind they'd just tolerate and keep going about their day. I started to assume I was just weak and pathetic because I couldn't power through my headaches the way I saw other people do. It was very disheartening during a time where I had especially poor self-image and self-confidence. This thought process went on for years unchecked.

Finally, 6ish years ago now, a close friend of mine sent me a message: "I think I have an actual migraine for the first time in my life, how the fuck do you live like this?" I offered him every trick I know to help reduce the severity of a migraine, to some degree of success. That night when I was lying in bed, his words starting sinking in and I realized I shouldn't be so readily dismissive of what I deal with. Eventually this led me to a much healthier mindset:

There is no objective measure of pain, only a measure of how it impacts you as an individual.

Pain is strictly subjective and dwelling on how it impacts others is only going to burden you down even more. Don't be ashamed of how deeply any given thing hurts you, physically or emotionally. You are surviving pain that is overwhelming to you, and that means you're strong.


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in reply to @BridgetEndeavor's post:

Basically I found a particular CBD oil dosage that helps a great deal if I take it when I feel a migraine starting but before it fully sets in. I usually drink some honey vanilla chamomile herbal tea alongside it to help relax me further so that worst case I can sleep through it a bit easier. Been helping a lot but your mileage may vary.

This is absolutely a "it worked for me but it might not work for you" thing, but my wife suffered a ton from migraines and discovered that, tho stress and fatigue play a significant part, she also had significant food triggers. We basically just listed all the common food triggers, cut them all out of our diet for a month to desensitize, then slowly reintroduced foods, eating a bunch of a particular thing in a single week to try to manually trigger a migraine.

At this point they're under control; she only gets a few a year, and they're all immediately traceable to either a food source she knows is bad that she risked anyway, or a big stressor. No promises, but maybe try that?

(For her, the big things that get her are nitrates, so no dried fruit or cured meats, especially bacon. Red wine is okay in moderation. We're very lucky that hard cheeses and onions are fine; they're common triggers that would have forced us to drastically change our diet.)

yeah. Yeah,

i usually tell people 'pain is pain and it fucking sucks and it's not a competition' when it comes to people mentioning pain to me while venting but then stopping when they remember that i have fibro, and migraines. it's fine to vent about your pain to someone who cares about you, because even just mentioning that you're going Through Some Shit™ can help, if only by just a little bit.

as a longtime migraine-sufferer, this reminder is very valuable to me. i forget that needing to lie down for many hours isn't 'normal' and that i am functioning at all is an achievement. so, thank you for this :yeah: